Code Igniter vs Laravel

All these people keep saying codeigniter is "proven and stable". I'm a codeigniter fan, but when sessions have been broken for years, it's kinda hard to back that claim. Laravel is fully unit tested and 100% stable. There are benefits to codeigniter over laravel and vice versa, but 'stability' is not one of them.

Narf has been putting in a lot of effort into updating the sessions library for 3.0. I'm looking forward to it.

Just remember, that Laravel is a really well thought out framework headed and supported by some of the more advanced php programmers out there. Whether we like it or not, the direction of the PHP language and Laravel are moving along hand in hand. At the rate it's been going for the last few years, Codeigniter will become completely obsolete if it doesn't play serious catch up.

To your comment on "the direction of the PHP language and Laravel are moving along hand in hand" Do you think it’s because Laravel changes to what is "cool" year over year. It’s going on it’s 3rd rewrite (full version changes 3,4,5) in 3 years http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laravel (February 22, 2012). I have CodeIgniter code running the latest version of CodeIgniter older than Laravel still make the company I work for hard cash.


I tried to switch our companies team and our software over to Laravel when it was version 3. Only 3 months into the process the Laravel Dev told everyone "Laravel 4 is right around the corner don't use Laravel 3”. Laravel 4 was still buggy as heck what was I suppose to do? That's when I left Laravel and came back to CodeIgniter. Seems Laravel 5 is “changing” yet again from what I understand. What is their long term support policy “hang on it’s going to be a bumpy ride”? Unfortunately, I can't work that way. After I told my boss the 3 months of work that our team used to “try” Laravel was wasted he wasn’t to happy. Of course when I told him we didn’t need to upgrade our servers (because Laravel is slower and uses more memory) he seemed to cheer up a little.

If you create applications you don't need to support for more than a year or 2 this is great. I can image all the package dev’s will be moving on to the latest and greatest version of Laravel because like you. “Why support outdated code” right? I hope your not using any 3rd party Laravel 4 packages in your software. Look how many are supporting Laravel 3 these days? The Laravel 3 users certainly “got left holding the bag” Glad I bailed when I did.

If I followed the Laravel path I would need to update my code every year just to “keeping up with the Jones”. Honestly at some point it is just your dev’s ego’s you are stroking just because they want “new toys”? You can get a good sense of the maturity level that uses a certain framework by the amount of fanboy comments you see on the boards. Honestly the “CodeIgniter is like a dead horse!” followed by another 30 lemmings “ha ha ha ya it should just die ha ha ha”. Says a lot for the user base.

Sure you could save a few lines of code here and there but, are you going to tell me CodeIgniter would hold you back from making money? Where I work new features and customer support rings the cash register. Our customers could careless if I am running the latest version of Laravel, CodeIgniter, raw PHP, Ruby, Perl or even ASP. Day after day, year after year (try saying that with Laravel) our company makes money using CodeIgniter. Don’t forget CI can Composer in ANY package Laravel can. Thank’s for namespacing YOUR code for us and yes we write PHPunit tests internally.

Another thing to consider is Long term support for teaching a PHP framework over a few school semesters.
If you had to teach PHP framework programming with Laravel it would be a nightmare. You have 15 students that take PHP frameworks 101 in there first year (Laravel 3). 15 more the next year take PHP frameworks 101 (now Laravel 4). Finally all 30 students take PHP frameworks 102 in the 3rd year (second year for the second group) and it’s a complete a different framework (Laravel 5)! Most colleges and Universities are 4 years can you imagine the nightmare this could create!

I realize CI will change some stuff to support some of the “time tested” patterns (you all remember PSR0 right ya Laravel jumped on that didn’t they?).

I just hope it doesn't change just to “stay cool”.

Could not agree more.
You should write a blog